


A Lightsaber is Never Just a Lightsaber

by JediDryad



Series: February Fluff: 28 Ways Luke and Mara Get it Together at last. [7]
Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Thrawn Trilogy - Timothy Zahn
Genre: Angst and Fluff, Confrontation, F/M, Look at us talking and everything, Luke needs a hug, a much smarter couple than usual, february fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:21:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29111484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JediDryad/pseuds/JediDryad
Summary: Mere hours ago, Mara Jade left a certain Coruscant rooftop with Luke Skywalker. He'd just given her his father's old lightsaber without seeming to think it a particularly big deal.Mara disagrees, and she can't figure out what the silver cylinder filled with history hanging at her belt means. So, she's going to find out from the only person who can tell her. And she's going to find out now.
Relationships: Mara Jade/Luke Skywalker
Series: February Fluff: 28 Ways Luke and Mara Get it Together at last. [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2129439
Comments: 16
Kudos: 50





	A Lightsaber is Never Just a Lightsaber

Mara Jade was struggling to recognize the emotions she was feeling. She keyed in the code to her apartment and stalked inside as she determined that agitation was definitely in there. Feeling unsettled and anxious was to be expected, she supposed. She had just agreed to take on the task of coordinating smugglers and improving their relationship with the New Republic government. The scope and weight of that commitment was probably best not contemplated too closely if she wanted to keep her fancy lunch on the right side of her esophagus.

But that wasn’t it, not all of it.

She unclipped a long silver cylinder from her belt and gingerly placed it on her table. Then she plunked herself down in a chair and just stared at it. Since Luke Skywalker had given it to her hours ago, it had felt like a detonator on her belt. Darth Vader’s lightsaber, held like a lost heirloom by Obi Wan Kenobi, and then given to Skywalker to affirm his destiny. 

Why the kriff had he given it to her?

“Because I want you to have it.”

She shook her head to clear his words. They were ridiculous. Was he trying to frame the gift as some sort of Force prompted action? Tomorrow, would she find herself in a situation where she’d be ever so grateful the galaxy’s only jedi had thought to give her this useful tool?

It was possible, but the explanation seemed far too thin.

What did he want from her?

Mind churning, she got up and stalked over to her counter where she grabbed a small glass and a bottle of Whyren’s.

The drink was unlikely to help the growing headache, but it might soothe her jangling nerves just a bit.

She sipped slowly, letting the warmth of the strong alcohol sink into her as she contemplated the weapon with hostility. By the time she’d drained her glass, the sun was drifting close to the horizon, lighting up the room like firelight.

This was ridiculous, she thought as the shadows crept in. She wasn’t going to get answers from the saber. Decision made, she grabbed it, and made the trek upstairs and along the corridor.

Skywalker’s suite was on the same side of the palace as hers, but understandably much larger. She thought about knocking or using the annunciator, but decided this was too important to rely on Skywalker’s willingness to elaborate. The Whyren’s may have helped with the decision.

With barely a thought, she tapped in an ancient override code, flipped his entry panel open and short circuited the lock with a quick sequence perfected long ago. It didn’t say much for the Republic’s security team that they missed that one, she decided as the door slid open and she walked right in.

“Mara?” 

Skywalker was standing at the window in his great room. He appeared to have been watching the sun drop lower. He seemed a little surprised to see her.

“What’s wrong?”

She scowled and placed the lightsaber on his table with a thunk, much as she had on her own.

“Wanna tell me what this is really about?”

His forehead wrinkled.

“I said I wanted you to have it.”

“Yeah, yeah. You thought I might need it. You think I’ll become a jedi. You think I ‘deserve it’ whatever the kriff that means…”

She paused and levelled her gaze at him. His blue eyes widened and she watched him swallow tightly.

“I don’t buy it.”

He was clearly taken aback now, but he remained silent as she struggled to find words for what was bothering her.

“Skywalker.” she fumbled gesturing towards the saber, “This is your family, your final connection to people you will never see again. People you barely knew in the first place. People you will never get answers from.”

She saw a slight lift to his eyebrows. Apparently that was not what the lightsaber meant to him.

She wrapped her arms around herself for a moment.

“I have nothing from my family, from before the palace.” she ground out. 

“No trinkets. No wise words. Not even any real memories, just a fuzzy smile, and the strong... feeling that they didn’t want me to go.”

She took a breath to steady herself as the expected swell of emotion that came with those vague echoes swept through her. Then she plunged on ahead.

“If I had this,” She pointed at the saber again. “Something concrete, something to hold onto that belonged to them, I would never let it go. I certainly wouldn’t give it to some random woman who’d been threatening to kill me up until about 2 standard weeks ago.”

Skywalker shrugged and she wanted to slap the serenity off his face.

“What makes you think I won’t sell it, or take it out to your balcony and drop it over the edge?”

His gaze sharpened, “I know you won’t.”

He was right, of course.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

She felt her lips twist as rage flooded her.

“Kriff, Skywalker. No I don’t!”

“I think you do.”

“Well it doesn’t matter if you think I know. It’s pointless to assume any of this shavit. And it’s a hell of a burden to put on me. One I didn’t ask for.”

That hit home. He seemed to turn to stone in the vanishing light and she advanced on him, a predator seeing the soft underbelly at last.

“Why do you want me to have your only family memory?”

“Do you want me to take it back?” His voice was barely above a whisper.

Something in Mara’s chest seemed to crack. Luke wasn’t the only with a soft underbelly.

“What does it mean, Skywalker?”

He let out a long breath and ran his hands over his face and through his hair. His expression was bleak, eyes filled with something beyond sadness.

Mara felt the crack widen.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything.” He offered up helplessly, “I just...wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that you could be a jedi - if you want” he clarified quickly.

He sat down on the arm of his sofa, deflated.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think you would see it as coming with expectations. It doesn’t. Really.”

For some reason, this made her even angrier.

“No expectations? ‘Just here’s the most important object in my life and I don’t care if you disappear with it and never cross my path again’.”

He sucked in a breath as though she’d stabbed him, and then he got to his feet, clearly agitated.

“I do care.” he sounded irritated. “I want to see you again.”

He paused and then closed his mouth as a realization came to him.

He then shook his head and smirked slightly, “and, considering you just broke into my apartment, I don’t know if I really have to worry about you staying away.”

Mara held firm even though his smile made her cracked heart turn to goo.

“If security isn’t capable of noticing a glaring holdover from Imperial times, that’s their problem.”

His smirk became a full blown grin and Mara found herself taking two steps towards him. The room might be almost in total darkness, but he seemed to light it up.

“The point is Mara, that it’s your choice.”

“You don’t care what choice I make?”

The smile shrank. He seemed to pull in on himself again. Scared, she registered suddenly, vulnerable. That soft underbelly. He was probably as scared as she was. 

She felt her cheeks redden. It wasn’t particularly fair of her to come in here hurling accusations and interrogating him like a recalcitrant prisoner. He wasn’t a criminal. He’d given her a gift.

How did other people get the answers they needed?

“I have a preference.” He said quietly into her silence.

“Then why not say so?”

His gaze dropped to the floor between them, face illuminated by nothing but the flickering light of passing speeders. 

“There are things I have wanted out of life that seemed impossible long before the Death Star plans fell into my lap and burned my tiny world to the ground. And becoming a Jedi just made it all the more likely that I would always be alone.”

His lips curved up slightly.

“Over the past few months, I’ve found myself imagining, dreaming. Too much...” 

His words dissolved into silence. He glanced back up and the intensity in his eyes froze her breath in her lungs. 

“It’s too much to ask.”

Mara swallowed and closed her eyes on a question she was afraid to have answered.

“Why?”

Luke let out a sound that was a cross between a sob and cry of rage.

“Because for five years, you were forced to see my face in your mind and associate it with the death and destruction of everything you knew and cared about. For five years, I’ve been inextricable from the absolute worst moment of your life. Even if you don’t hate me now, why would you want to think of me any more than you have to?”

Mara nodded as his explanation dropped all the pieces in place. Of course that’s how these months would have seemed to him. Hadn’t she told him as much? Dreams of him killing Palpatine, and dreams of him dying had been her only permanent companion for half a decade.

When he’d opened his eyes on Myrkr, she’d thought she’d already known all about him based on his defeat of a rancor and a vision from her master. But, he was none of those things.

He was confident, and patient. He was thoughtful and cooperative. He was stubborn and filled with overly ambitious ideas about how the galaxy could be if beings cared enough to make it that way. He was a being who cared enough to make it that way. 

He actually embodied all the things she’d believed she’d stood for as Emperor’s Hand.

They’d fought off Vornskrs and Star Destroyers together. He’d pulled her, mostly dead, out of a sea of battle debris, and then he’d broken her out of prison before offering to sacrifice himself to C’Baoth so that she and his family might go free.

She thought maybe that had meant something more than just allyship, and she’d been furious at the thought she’d been wrong. Humiliated. But she hadn’t realized what she’d left undone. She’d refused to kill him. She’d let him teach her. She’d sought him out when she’d needed his help. But that terrifying vulnerability was only scary to her. It didn’t communicate what she thought it had: that she was open to something more.

She’d been filled with bitterness and rage, and she’d dumped it all at his feet. She’d never recanted. No wonder he wouldn’t imagine she’d changed her mind, really. He’d listened to her ranting. He’d seen her nightmares.

Of course he would see it as too much to ask. And yet, Luke Skywalker, who included droids in his family and wildly adored a sister he didn’t meet till he was 20 would never be able to keep his feelings to himself entirely.

So he gave her something that mattered to him.

Because she mattered to him. And he would never have said a damn thing about it. Because he thought it was too much to ask that he might matter to her too.

She felt her throat tighten and tears threaten.

“Luke,” 

The flash in his eyes as she spoke his given name for the first time gave her any remaining answers she needed. She closed the space between them and nervously placed her hands against his chest where he sat slumped on the arm of his sofa.

“Don’t let him take anything more from us.”

His eyes lit up brighter than those suns on that hideous desert planet he’d been raised on.

Trembling, she slid her hands onto his shoulders and stopped, uncertain what to do, berating herself for her lack of experience in this area.

Mara Jade could dance the 16 official dances of the court. She could make herself understood in 10 languages. She knew how to slip behind security and plant enough thermal charges to take out a city block. But, in this moment, she was utterly beyond herself. She didn’t know how to show Luke what she felt. She didn’t know how to wrap all her feelings in a kiss. 

But tender expression, she realized, was Luke Skywalker’s forte, and she melted into him as he met her halfway, his lips settling on hers as their arms tightened around one another.

The sun finished setting, leaving them in the dark velvety night.

But none of that mattered. They found one another by touch and taste.


End file.
